Bertrand Russell and Me

Bertrand Russell and Me

When I was young, I idolized Bertrand Russell—I idolized the man. It was largely because of him that I fled psychology into the arms of philosophy. But I am not the same kind of philosopher as Russell: my interests are different and always have been. I find his interests somewhat chilly and unnatural. I would say his main interest (his only interest really) is knowledge and skepticism. Everything else grows out of that: he is obsessed with doubt and the skeptical challenge (how can we know anything?). That question has never really troubled me, except academically; it isn’t a living problem for me. It doesn’t pulsate within me or keep me awake at night. Why this difference? Why the difference of intellectual temperament?

I mean this as a psychological question, specifically a child-psychological question. What is it about our background and upbringing that explains the difference? Why was he so obsessed with doubt and the possibility of knowledge? The answer is staring us in the face, though it wasn’t appreciated in Russell’s day. Namely: he lost both of his parents at an early age. His mother died of diphtheria in 1874 when he was 2 and his father died in 1876 of bronchitis (possibly also a broken heart) when he was 4. This was a double blow: he must have suffered acutely from maternal deprivation and paternal deprivation, even though he would have little or no memory of either parent. This is traumatizing stuff, inflicted on a barely rational infant. Just think of the shock to his heart and brain. No mother to hold and be close to and love; then, no father to admire and depend upon. His father’s deep depression over his wife’s early death would have hung heavy in the air, underscoring little Bertie’s own loss. His mother would have been an absent presence, actively non-existent. He knew of her, but he hardly knew her. In later life his parents would have seemed like Meinongian objects: subsisting in the recesses of memory but never robustly existing. Simply put, he didn’t know his parents—not as you and I know ours. He didn’t grow up with them around, save for a few short years, only surrogates for them. Wouldn’t it be natural for him to yearn for knowledge of what had been lost—long to be acquainted with those vanished figures? He might well grow skeptical of anything remaining in existence. He might be riddled with uncertainty in the marrow of his being. He would certainly not be psychologically normal. He might even find refuge in the certainty of mathematics and its ability to stay the course—as he confessed about his childhood (Euclid was his parental substitute). He was a lonely little boy, parentless, adrift, stricken with doubt and fear. Numbers became his Mum and Dad—and they are not too warm as parents. I, on the other hand, had a normal upbringing in this respect: my parents were always around, never in doubt, a source of security and certainty, enormously salient. So, I am not riddled with doubt, obsessed with existence and non-existence, in need of knowledge I don’t and can’t have. For children do need knowledge, particularly with regard to parental presence, and I had it but Russell didn’t. Accordingly, I am not deeply troubled by skepticism; it doesn’t frighten me. I am more interested in the nature and origin of things—not in their mere existence. Thus, my early interests were in chemistry and biology not mathematics and logic. I took existence for granted. Baby Bertie woke up one day and found his mother was dead; two years later the same thing happened with his father. Gone, just like that, never to return. I had no such soul-shattering experience. I gravitated towards butterflies and their life-cycle not numbers and their everlasting existence.

But there is a more perplexing part to this epistemological story: for Russell was deeply ambivalent about doubt and certainty. He craved certainty, needed it, felt it in his bones (at least in some areas—though here too doubts would creep in); but he also distrusted it, excoriated it, spurned it. His entire ethical and political life revolved around questioning dogma and extolling skepticism; not for nothing was he called a passionate skeptic—he was passionately skeptical. He hated certainty—while not being able to live without it. Why? The answer is not hard to find: his mother wanted Bertie raised as an agnostic, but his grandmother had other ideas and raised him as a dogmatic Christian. She raised him to believe that he was justifiably certain about highly uncertain things; not surprisingly, when adolescent rationality set in, he began questioning all of that and ended up an atheist. So, we have skeptical forces at work in his psyche combined with the love of logical and mathematical certainty: he was both certain of some things and profoundly skeptical about others. He wasn’t a passionate skeptic about logic! We might call this “Russell’s paradox”: certainty is to be deplored and avoided, on the one hand, but it is to be adored and celebrated, on the other. It was both good and bad, virtuous and vicious. It would be psychologically more harmonious to adopt a uniform attitude: either nothing is certain or everything is. Mathematics is certain but everything else (especially religion) is uncertain. Of course, his position is logically consistent, but psychologically there are stresses and strains at work (“cognitive dissonance”). And things get murky when we consider the paradoxes of set theory and the questionable epistemic status of atheism: the former undermines mathematical knowledge, the latter impugns the right to be certain of the non-existence of God. None of this is psychological plain sailing, especially if you have serious hang-ups about knowledge deriving from parental death.[1]

Back to Russell and me. We both love to write and we are both good at it. We both love philosophy, though we were initially trained in other subjects. We were both cancelled (by American zealots in both cases) and accused of all manner of nonsense. We both agonize over the folly of mankind and despise uncritical convention. We both enjoy humor (too much for our own good sometimes). We are both haughty and contemptuous where fools are concerned (that is, everywhere). But I am not obsessed with skepticism and human knowledge (its scope and limits), though I am interested in what is mysterious and what is not. I am more interested in the mind than he was, and more artistically inclined (music seems to have had little appeal for him). I like to know the make-up of things as opposed to knowing their existence or otherwise. I like fiction but not “logical fictions”. I wonder how things would have gone if our roles had been reversed: what if I came first and he started reading me in his late teens? What if he had been studying mathematics but found myautobiography inclining him in a philosophical direction? What if he had never lost his parents at an early age? Allow me, please, to fantasize that he would have become a philosopher in my mold and left skepticism to the existentially insecure (in both senses). In splendid old age he would then write about my influence on him and our philosophical differences. He might be heavily into ethics and aesthetics and wonder why I spent so much time worrying about what we can and cannot understand—why all the tormented mysterianism? Were my parents perhaps mysteries to me, though always around?[2]

[1] If the skeptic is right, your parents might never have existed; they might have always been dead. They might be illusions like everything else. You might have always been maternally deprived, despite appearances.

[2] It gives me pleasure to write about Bertie and me after all this time, a perk of old age. I never knew him, though I did once receive a letter from him, but he has been a continuous presence my whole life.